-- This is a terrible time of year for the Cranky Pants, emphasis -- naturally -- on terrible. You strap on the CPs with the scratchy hair-shirt-like lining, and all of sudden it's 78 degrees. Result: acute snappishness. Next day, it's the snazzy CPs with the wicking system built in for angry sweat prevention and then -- cold. We're no good in cold. Summer-deflating clouds and San Francisco's bitter wind makes us -- what's the word? -- cranky.

-- Thankfully, the TV gods have sent Nancy Grace nearly to our doorstep. Like a truffle-snorting pig, Grace got a whiff of the killing of defense attorney Daniel Horowitz's wife, Pamela Vitale, and quicker than you can say "made for cable crime scene," her little shop of horrors has alighted upon the East Bay. Hello Lafayette, sell your houses now.

Have you seen this? Grace and Horowitz are friends, though they represent different sides of the judicial system. "Guilty Guilty" Grace likes to lock up and prosecute then get the facts later, while Horowitz has never been shy about representing the morally dubious in a hail of media coverage. To have it come to this: Grace attempting compassion and Horowitz all-too-willingly talking about his emotions is not only surreal, it's not very believable. Instead: sad and creepy. But it recalls -- and here we thought this memory was long forgotten -- Katie Couric and Columbine. Grace knows that Horowitz hadn't been ruled out as a suspect and she played coy with that from the get-go while playing up the Couric-styled faux sincerity. Ratings makes a whore of journalism pretty much every time.

This is our backyard soap opera. Get used to it. Late Wednesday, a neighborhood teen was arrested.

-- Who among you is surprised that Ashton Kutcher is mining his personal life and marriage to Demi Moore for a Fox series called "30 Year Old Grandpa"? No, our cynicism is not rising -- how could it? -- but there are very real concerns about turning into a scruffy wanderer who talks out loud to himself on Market Street about pop culture conspiracies.

-- You think having three anchors on "Nightline" will bring in three more viewers?

-- We're not sure what's more absurd, TV news reporter Michelle Kosinski's now infamous "Today" show canoe stunt -- doing flood reporting live from a canoe that was in only a few inches of water, as everyone found out when two guys walked by -- or the disingenuous explanation that she gave the New York Observer, which was, in short: We had to do it in shallow water for technical reasons, but we weren't trying to deceive anyone.

No. Clearly not. Who would believe that a TV reporter would stage a segment? Blame here goes to Dan Rather (remember him?), godfather of storm reporting and, yes, to Anderson Cooper as well. Now kids of all stripes, and eager TV journalists as well, are just bored stiff by "normal" weather. Dude, if you're not skydiving into Wilma, what's the point?

-- And no, we didn't ratchet up the cranky level upon seeing President Bush's staged (and painfully inarticulate and clumsy) "interview" with soldiers. It's just more comforting to think of the White House as a kind of writer's room for "The Daily Show." If you imagine it all as theater, or entertainment, it's ever so more palatable.

-- We will be withholding judgment on "The Colbert Report" because it's a live show and almost nothing true or fair can be gleaned from the early going.

-- We do know this, however: Watching Nancy Grace on Wednesday night was physically painful. A full year's salary was earned that night. She would roll her eyes up into her head while thinking, and talking, about possible (often horrible) scenarios. "We've pixilated out the door at Daniel's request. We did not want Pamela's blood to be publicized."

Good night, friend. Does anyone want this job?

-- Like every, what, third person in the free world? -- we are in love with our iPod. But we didn't drink the Apple-flavored Kool-Aid because the new iPod-as-TV seems, on the one hand, stupid, and, on the other, pointless. Are we to believe that people who have lusted after big-screen TV sets for the past eight years or so are going to give that up just to watch what amounts to a thumb-nail sketch of "Lost"?

Please. There are early adopters and there are the easily led. They are not always the same people.

Besides, it's clear that the killer app for the iPod-as-TV is porn. Once the minxes can be downloaded at iTunes, you've got yourself Daddy's new Christmas present.

You don't need a televisionary to tell you that nobody in the I-need-an-extra-iPod demo really wants to watch "Desperate Housewives," much less pay for it. Some of them may want their dumbed-down and hipless MTV, and others may want dumbed-down and hips-from-heaven porn stars, but otherwise, the market for a bunch of Disney reruns on a postage-stamp-size screen has got to be pretty meager.

-- Just wondering: Does Oprah think she's Jesus?

-- Some people have been hoping we'd pull on the Cranky Pants and get incensed about the revamped TV Guide. To which we say: Iraq, Katrina, bird flu, Nancy Grace.

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